For the first time in thirty two years of living with my husband, I find myself a housewife.
I'll be honest, it's not my strong suit.
Not to mean that our house is a nasty dump, it's far from it, but I would never suggest you could eat off the floor.
Nor should you.
Trust me...we've always had dogs.
(notice dogs is plural)
I do manage to keep things neat and tidy for the most part, with a place for everything and everything in its place.
Usually....well, at least more times than not.
I've always worried more about how the outside of my house and yards looked. The grass has to be cut at least once a week, sometimes twice in the summer months. Everything has to be weeded and trimmed, and once that is done, walkways, porches and driveways have to be swept or blown clear of all leaves, trimmings and debris.
Our first house.
Our second house.
Rental Sardine Can in Orlando, for almost two (excruciating) years.
Our new home.
Welcome home.
My thinking is this:
No one driving down the street or by our house can tell if our toilet or kitchen sink is clean from their car, but will certainly notice an unkempt or overgrown yard...at least I do. In our old neighborhood back in Georgia, I'd even cut other yards in the neighborhood after people moved out and the yards grew up. You'd think the real estate company would keep the yards up, but they didn't.
Maybe it's because I did!
Two yards I cut for almost a year, before the properties were bought, or foreclosed. I cut the front of the subdivision for free for a couple of years, never once contacted by the HOA about compensation, or even a "Thank You" until I had been doing it for almost two years. It's a good thing I like yard work.
I will say that I have been a much better housekeeper since we moved to Florida. For the first two years, we lived in a cinder block sardine can rental where everything had to be in its place... or you couldn't fit through the front door.
Plus, the rent was astronomically high... for an 1,100 sq ft cement block. Of course moving into rental with three big dogs didn't help but I was bound and determined to get that huge deposit back, made bigger by the (three) pet additional deposit.
It took Ziggy and Charlie about fourteen seconds of being put out back for the first time...for them to claw the back sliding screen door to shreds.
And I mean complete shreds.
Zach immediately took it off and we hid it in the garage under all the broken down moving boxes.
I can't believe it, but they never noticed it being gone when we moved out...the back porch was screened in as well so it wasn't like you stepped out the sliding glass door right onto the grass, which there wasn't much of to begin with. The back yard was about the size of the inside of the house, not counting the attached one (Smart) car size garage.
It was a long two years.
After one year, we were down to two dogs.
I kept the corners swept and dusted, I planted flowers in the front flower bed, which I had to weed first, and made it look like home, albeit cracker box style.
The appliances were all from the seventies, including the washer, dryer and a garage door opener older than the Flintstones. It was living a Brady Bunch lifestyle after Mike got laid off and they had to fire Alice.
I knew (hoped) it was temporary, so I tried to keep the damage down to the screen door my dogs had shredded like cabbage the first five minutes after we entered the house for the very first time.
I did good.
We got our deposit back in full, although it took over two months. They took out less than a hundred dollars, for dry cleaning the drapes (also from the seventies) and a window lock they say we broke. It was after a hurricane when we were out of power for three days and I felt like my body was going to spontaneously combust. We opened every single window, had to fight with one, but won the battle, even as a screw fell out of the frame.
We paid well over $1,400 a month rent for a cement box when we first moved here.
The mortgage on our house back in Newnan, 4 BR 2.5 BA, 2 car garage on an acre lot with a front yard that like looked like a putting green, was costing us $1461 a month, and that was on a fifteen year mortgage.
You rent, because you need to live somewhere but can't buy a house, because there's nothing left after paying astronomical rent, to save for a down payment on a house of your own , when already barely scraping by in a rental.
If that's not a Catch 22, what is?
Anyhoo...moving on.
Cotton...the fabric of life. That's us.
What you see is what you get with this crazy family of mine; mostly a good thing.
And when it's not, at least it's always entertaining.
Like I said, always entertaining and rarely ever a dull moment.
And quite a few precious and proud moments.
Yeah, she's a Boss too.
I learned how to do Life from the Best.
Whatever may happen, has happened...will happen or not happen in my life... will always be superficial, small, and a tiny blip on the radar of life compared to the golden ticket I drew at birth in the parental lottery on July 31, 1960.
Ask anyone who was lucky enough to know my parents.
Not many people get the jump start in life that I was fortunate enough to have.
And then there are our dogs.
This is the picture of Ziggy (aka Lil Houdini) which was posted on Facebook, after we spent three hours looking for him after he jumped the back fence for seemingly the millionth time. The school nurses at the elementary school half a mile from our house had him in the office and posted his picture on FB.
Even our dogs are entertaining.
Our dogs have been total and constant companions to us over the years and an intricate part of our family.
They simply are family.
Bonus points, not one of them has ever complained.
Not even once.
Even if they sometimes had to wait for food or water longer than they would have liked to,
they still loved us, and were always beyond thrilled to see us walk through the door.
They are total mood boosters and always encouraging.
It may sound petty (pun intended) but if you don't even like dogs, much less totally love them, we're probably gonna have a hard time getting along.
Just saying.
There's a reason DOG is GOD spelled backwards.
Both are unconditional love.
(and no I'm not kidding)
For all which may have, and sometimes has gone wrong in my life, so much more has gone right.
...and then some.
So what?! I'm sixty years old and suddenly out of work...
it could be so much worse. (emphasis on the so)
I think I'm gonna take a pass on waiting tables for now and try not to worry about it too much.
Or at all.
It is the time to be grateful for simply being alive, and a time to practice frugality
I'm more focused right now on doing what I'm told to do by scientists and doctors, not preachers and politicians.
That seems the best way to survival, for everyone.
My only political comment, concern or question is this:
Why hasn't our President been wearing a mask from jump?
Somebody needs to tell him to turn around and look at science.
Over seven hundred ninety six thousand people have died from COVID 19 since early spring.
Maybe this will make it easier to grasp...
796,000 humans, gone from this earth because of this virus... in just a few months, with no end in sight.
That's getting too close to a million deaths for me, and extremely alarming.
Oh I know, the numbers may , and probably are off...but can they be that off?
I personally know well over ten people who had or have COVID-19.
Do you?
Because if you do, you should know how heart breaking and excruciating it is.
Some breeze through, luckily. Some have quite the time with it, left without the sense of smell and days upon days of fever, chills and mental fatigue.
And a lot of people have, and will die from it.
That's not really the list I want to choose from.
If there was only one rule in life, it should be this:
"Be a good person."
Is it really that hard?
Till next time...COTTON
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